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Thomas Holley Chivers
| birth_place = Washington, Georgia, United States | death_date = | death_place = Decatur, Georgia | occupation = Doctor Poet Playwright | movement = | genre = | notableworks = | influences = | influenced = | spouse = Frances Elizabeth Chivers Harriet Hunt | relatives = }} Dr.Thomas Holley Chivers (October 18, 1809 - December 18, 1858) was an American poet, best known for his friendship with Edgar Allan Poe and his defense of the poet after his death. Life Overview Born into a wealthy Georgia family, Chivers became interested in poetry at a young age. After he and his 1st wife separated, he received a medical degree from Transylvania University but focused his energy on publishing rather than medicine. In addition to submitting poems to various magazines and journals, Chivers published several volumes of poetry, including The Lost Pleiad in 1845, as well as plays. Edgar Allan Poe showed an interest in the young poet and encouraged his work. Chivers spent the last few years of his life defending the reputation of Poe, who had died in 1849, though he also thought Poe had been heavily influenced by his own poetry. Chivers died in Georgia in 1858. As a literary theorist, Chivers believed in divine inspiration. He encouraged the development of a distinctive American style of literature and especially promoted young writers. His poems were known for religious overtones with an emphasis on death and reunions with lost loved ones in the afterlife. Though he built up a mild reputation in his day, he was soon forgotten after his death. Youth and education Chivers was born on October 18, 1809,Nelson, 47 at Digby Manor, his father's plantation near Washington, Georgia.Ehrlich, Eugene and Gorton Carruth. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982: 260. ISBN 0195031865 At age 7, he was introduced to poetry when he read William Cowper's "The Rose".Parks, 166 In 1827, Chivers married his 16-year old cousin Frances Elizabeth Chivers. The 2 soon separated due to alleged meddling by Frances Chivers Albert, the wife of the poet's uncle, prior to the birth of their daughter in 1828.Watts, 113–114 It has also been suggested their separation was due to abuse, though these rumors originated from the same uncle.Lombard, 13 After this incident, Chivers compared himself to Lord Byron, whose wife had also left him.Hubbell, 551 Chivers went on to receive a degree in medicine in 1830 from Transylvania University in Kentucky. His thesis was titled "Intermittent and Remittent Fevers". Chivers wandered throughout the West and North of the United States, publishing poetry in various places before returning to Georgia. In 1832, Chivers published The Path of Sorrow, a collection of poetry based on the events of his troubled marriage. 2 years later, he published Conrad and Eudora; or, The Death of Alonzo, the 1st fictionalized account of the actual 1825 murder case nicknamed the "Kentucky Tragedy". The work was later renamed Leoni, The Orphan of Venice.Whited, 404–405 On November 21, 1834, Chivers married Harriet Hunt of Springfield, Massachusetts. The couple had 4 children, although all died young.Lombard, 14–15 Chivers and his 1st wife never legally divorced — a suit was dismissed in court in 1835 — but Georgia law invalidated marriage after a spouse's absence of 5 years or more.Lombard, 12. Though Chivers contributed to various newspapers and magazines, his poetry was turned down for publication by the Southern Literary Messenger in March 1835, which suggested he return to medicine and the "lancet and pill-box". Though the poems were not printed, unsigned commentary on them was presented in an editorial, referring to verses submitted by "T.H.C., M.D."Lombard, 14. The Lost Pleiad was self-published in New York in 1845 to initial success, though sales rapidly declined.Lombard, 46. In 1837, Chivers self-published Nacoochee; or, The beautiful star; with other poems. The volume was dedicated to his mother, who died a year later.Lombard, 38. Relationship with Poe Chivers is best known for his association with Edgar Allan Poe and, in fact, it is through this relationship that Chivers and his work was rediscovered in the 20th century.Hubbell, 550. The 1st interaction between them was in 1840 though they did not meet until 1845 in New York.Lombard, 99. They became friends, and Chivers was willing to give Poe lifetime financial support if he moved to the South.Kennedy, 54. Chivers appreciated Poe's ability and wrote that George Rex Graham was seriously underpaying Poe for his work on Graham's Magazine. "He ought to give you ten thousand dollars a year... It is richly worth it... Graham is greatly indebted to you. It is not my opinion that you have ever been, or ever will be, paid for your intellectual labours. You need never expect it, until you establish a Magazine of your own", he wrote, referring to Poe's plans to begin The Stylus.Thomas & Jackson, 465. Even so, Chivers was concerned about Poe's reputation as a severe literary critic, cautioning him about "when you tomahawk people".Meyers, 140 Poe, in fact, had been hoping Chivers would lend his wealth as a financial backer for The Stylus and possibly even serve as a co-editor in its early planning stages.Silverman, 189–190. Chivers considered Poe's proposal but was not able to accept because of the death of his 3-year-old daughter just over a week later.Silverman, 190. The 2 had corresponded through letters but finally met in June or July 1845. Chivers visited Poe when Poe was sick and bedridden and when Poe's wife Virginia was in an especially difficult period of her struggle with tuberculosis. Chivers later recalled that Poe's voice was "like the soft tones of an Aeolian Harp when the music that has been sleeping in the strings is awakened by the Breezes of Eden laden with sweet Spices from the mountains of the Lord". By September 1845, however, Chivers was lecturing Poe on the dangers of alcohol. A Prohibitionist, he said Poe was wasting his God-given talents by indulging in drink. "Why should a Man whom God, by nature, has endowed with such transcendent abilities, so degrade himself into the veriest automaton as to be moved only by the poisonous steam of Hell-fire?" he said. While Poe's wife Virginia was sick, Chivers had to carry Poe home after a night of excess. Moreover, as attested to in an 1848 pamphlet titled Search After Truth, Chivers disagreed with Poe regarding aesthetics. This small booklet presents a series of dialogues between the Seer Chivers and Politian Poe. For Chivers, a poet should be a Shelleyan or Swedenborgian visionary intent on capturing mystic realms of experience in language. For Poe, the poet is merely a superior wordsmith. The wise Seer ultimately leads Politan to the truth.Chivers, Thomas Holley. Search After Truth. New York: Scholar's Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976. After Poe's death In 1853, after Poe's death, Chivers published an article in Waverley Magazine under the pseudonym "Fiat Justitia" ("let justice be done"), claiming that Poe had taken the meter and internal rhymes of "The Raven" from Chivers's poem "To Allegra Florence en Heaven" (published in 1842), a stanza of which he quoted: “Holy angels now are bending to receive thy soul ascending Up to Heaven to joys unending, and to bliss which is divine; While thy pale cold form is fading under Death’s dark wings now shading Thee with gloom which is pervading this poor broken heart of mine! And as God doth lift his spirit up to Heaven there to inherit Those rewards which it doth merit, such as none have reaped before; Thy dear father will to-morrow lay thy body, with deep Sorrow, In the grave which is so narrow, there to rest forevermore.” As well, "Fiat Justitia" claimed, Poe took the idea of "The Raven's" refrain from "an 1836 poem" by Chivers, and even the use of "Nevermore" in the refrain from "Lament on the Death of My Mother," an 1839 poem by Chivers.Fiat Justitia, "Origin of Poe's Raven," Waverley Magazine, July 30, 1853. Edgar Allen Poe Society of Baltimore, Web, May 17, 2018. Chivers made similar charges regarding Poe's "Ulalame".Moss, 101. Other critics, though suggested that Chivers's Eonchs of Ruby were a "mediocre restatement" of Poe's poems.Lombard, 17 The 1st poem of that collection, "The Vigil of Aiden", was an explicit homage to Poe, using names like "Lenore" and the refrain "forever more!"Lombard, 62–63 Chivers also suggested in the Georgia Citizen that Poe learned to write poetry from him. As literary scholar Randy Nelson wrote: "anybody who's read both Poe and Thomas Holley Chivers can see that one of them 'influenced' the other, but just who took what from whom isn't clear."Nelson, 212 Even so, Chivers continued to praise and admire Poe (albeit careful to point out Poe's literary debt to him) and was an early defencer of the "real Poe" in the face of the sustained attacks on Poe's reputation by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the poet's literary executor. This correction took the form of a memoir now titled Chivers' Life of Poe, not published until 1952. Chivers said of Griswold that he "is not only incompetent to Edit any of Poe's works, but totally unconscious of the duties which he and every man who sets himself up as a Literary Executor, owe the dead."Chivers, 70 Chivers continued to defend Poe's reputation until the end of his life. Final years and death From 1845 to 1850, Chivers had been living with his wife in Georgia, then spent the next 5 years in the North. His poetry collection Eonchs of Ruby: A gift of love was published in 1851 with a subtitle meant to capitalize on the gift book trend. Atlanta; or, The true blessed island of poesy: A Paul epic in three lustra was published in 3 installments in the Georgia Citizen beginning in January 1853.Lombard, 77. Later that year, Memoralia; or, Philas of amber full of the tears of love was printed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (and generally received unfavorably).Lombard, 85. Very shortly after, the same publisher brought out Virginalia; or, Songs of my summer nights, a collection made up of poems that were generally under 200 lines each, about half of which had previously been published in magazines.Lombard, 89 By 1855, Chivers and his wife had moved back to Georgia and he predicted that the slavery issue would soon force his home state to break from the United States.Lombard, 97 A slaveholder himself, Chivers did not believe that slaves should be abused, though he still defended the institution against abolitionists.Lombard, 114 Struck with sudden illness, Chivers wrote his will before dying on December 18, 1858, in Decatur, Georgia.Lombard, 18 His last words were, "All is perfect peace with me."Hubbell, 552 His last published work, a drama titled The Sons of Usna, had been published earlier that year. At the time of his death, Chivers had prepared several manuscripts of his literary theory with the intention of publishing them in several volumes of books and as part of a lecture series.Parks, 183 In his will, he left a dollar for his first wife and their daughter. Writing In his poetry, Chivers made use of legends and themes from Native American culture, particularly the Cherokee, though often with Christian overtones.Lombard, 28 He was also heavily influenced by the work of François-René de ChateaubriandLombard, 24 and Emanuel Swedenborg.Lombard, 29 Many of Chivers's poems included themes of death and sorrow, often using images of shrouds, coffins, angels, and reunions with lost loves in the afterlife.Silverman, 259 Religious conventions at the time made discussion of death popular, as was reflected in poetry. Because of his background as a doctor, Chivers was able to graphically depict the last moments before someone's death. Chivers believed in a close connection between poetry and God and that true poetry could only be written through divine inspiration. He once wrote: "Poets are the apostles of divine thought, who are clothed with an authority from the Most High, to work miracles in the minds of men".Parks, 158 He also wrote: "Poetry is the power given by God to man of manifesting... the wise relations that subsist between him and God", and it "is that crystal river of the soul which runs through all the avenues of life, and after purifying the affections of the heart, empties itself into the Sea of God".Hubbell, 553 In Nacoochee, the preface states: "Poetry is that crystal river of the soul which runs through all the avenues of life, and after purifying the affections of the heart, empties itself into the Sea of God." Poe had written about Chivers in the 2nd part of his "Autography" series, published in Graham's Magazine in December 1841. Poe said: :His productions affect one as a wild dream — strange, incongruous, full of images of more than arabesque monstrosity, and snatches of sweet unsustained song. Even his worst nonsense (and some of it is horrible) has an indefinite charm of sentiment and melody. We can never be sure that there is any meaning in his words — neither is there any meaning in many of our finest musical airs — but the effect is very similar in both. His figures of speech are metaphor run mad, and his grammar is often none at all. Yet there are as fine individual passages to be found in the poems of Dr. Chivers, as in those of any poet whatsoever. In his introduction to Atlanta, written in 1842 but not published until 1853, Chivers gives a lengthy discussion of his poetic theory, pre-dating many ideas Poe would suggest in "The Poetic Principle" (1850). Chivers, for example, suggests that poems should be short to be successful: "No poem of any considerable length... can be pleasing to any well-educated person for any length of time".Lombard, 78. He also experimented with blank verse as early as 1832 and his 1853 collection, Virginalia, included mostly poems using blank verse.Lombard, 121. Chivers explained the title of his 1851 book, Eonchs of Ruby: "The word Eonch is the same as Concha Marina—Shell of the Sea. Eonch is used ... merely for its euphony."Lombard, 61. Throughout the collection, Chivers experiments with the sonic effects of words rather than their literal meaning.Lombard, 76. At least for a time, he considered Elizabeth Barrett Browning the best contemporary English poet.Parks, 169. Like many from his time, Chivers called for the development of a distinctive American literature and he especially encouraged young writers.Parks, 174. Poe called the 1845 poetry collection The Lost Pleiad "the honest and fervent utterance of an exquisitely sensitive heart." Overall, he called Chivers "one of the best and one of the worst poets in America".Thomas & Jackson. 353. William Gilmore Simms offered conditional praise of Chivers's poetry as well: "He possesses a poetic ardor sufficiently fervid, and a singularly marked command of language. But he should have been caught young, and well-bitted, and subjected to the severest training... As an artist, Dr. Chivers is yet in his accidence." Simms also commented that his works were too gloomy and melancholy. Critical reputation Though Chivers built up a mild reputation during his lifetime, counting Algernon Charles Swinburne among his admirers, his fame faded away quickly after his death. Other writers that acknowledged his influence included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, and Rudyard Kipling.Lombard, 132 Others, however, were more critical. One anonymous reviewer, possibly Evert Augustus Duyckinck, joked that Chivers was formulaic and suggested the formula included 30% Percy Bysshe Shelley, 20% Poe, 20% "mild idiocy", 10% "gibbering idiocy", 10% "raving mania" and 10% "sweetness and originality".Moore, Rayburn S. "A New Look at Thomas Holley Chivers", The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 13, no. 1. Fall 1980: University of North Carolina Press: 131. Literary scholar S. Foster Damon wrote that Chivers would have had a stronger reputation if he were born in the North and "the literary coteries there would surely have pruned and preserved him... But the time and space were against him." Publications Poetry *''The Path of Sorrow; or, The lament of youth''. Franklin, TN: privately published, 1832. *''Nacoochee; or, the Beautiful Star With Other Poems''. New York: printed by W.E. Dean, 1837. *''The Lost Pleiad, and other poems''. New York: printed by Edward O. Jenkins, 1845. *''Eonchs of Ruby: A gift of love''. New York: Spalding & Sheppard, 1851. *''Atlanta; or, The true blessed island of poesy: A Paul epic. Macon, GA: Citizen Office, 1853. *''Memoralia; or, Phials of amber full of the tears of love. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1853 *''Virginalia; or, Songs of My Summer Nights''. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1853; Brooklyn, NY: E.L. Schwaab, 1942. Plays *''Conrad and Eudora; or, The death of Alonzo: A tragedy in five acts. Philadelphia: 1834. *''The Death of the Devil: A serio-ludicro, tragico-comico, nigero-whiteman extravaganza (1852) *''The Sons of Usna: A tragic apotheosis in five acts''. Philadelphia: C. Sherman, 1858. *''Unpublished Plays'' (edited by Charles M. Lombard). Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1980. Non-fiction *''Search After Truth; or, A New Revelation of the Psycho-Physiological Nature of Man.'' (1848) *''Chivers' Life of Poe'' (edited by Richard Beale Davis). New York: Dutton, 1952. Collected editions *''Complete Works'' (edited by S. Foster Damon & Charles H. Wattsw). Providence, RI: Brown University Press. **''I. Correspondence, 1838-1858'' (edited by Emma Lester Chase & Lou Ferry Parks), 1957. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Thomas Holley Chivers, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Apr. 13, 2018. See also * List of U.S. poets References *Bell, Landon C. Poe and Chivers.''Columbus: Charles A. Trowbridge Co., 1931. *Brown, Ellen Firsching. "The Genius and Tragedy of Georgia's Lost Poet". ''Georgia Backroads, Vol. 8 No. 3, Autumn 2009. *Damon, S. Foster. Thomas Holley Chivers, Friend of Poe. New York, 1930 * Hubbell, Jay B. The South in American Literature: 1607–1900. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1954. * Kennedy, J. Gerald. "A Brief Biography", A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0195121503 * Lombard, Charles M. Thomas Holley Chivers. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979. ISBN 0805772588 * Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy New York: Cooper Square Press, 1992. ISBN 0815410387 * Moss, Sidney P. Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu. Carbondale, Ill: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. * Nelson, Randy F. The Almanac of American Letters. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981. ISBN 086576008X * Parks, Edd Winfield. Ante-Bellum Southern Literary Critics. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1962. * Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. ISBN 0060923318 * Thomas, Dwight and David K. Jackson. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1987. ISBN 0783814011 * Watts, Charles Henry. Thomas Holley Chivers; His Literary Career and His Poetry. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1956. *Whited, Stephen R. "Kentucky Tragedy", The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Joseph M. Flora and Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan (editors). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. ISBN 0807126926. Accessed January 24, 2008. Notes External links ;Poems * Chivers, Thomas Holley (2 poems) at Representative Poetry Online *Thomas Holley Chivers at PoemHunter (7 poems) ;Prose *"Origin of Poe's 'Raven'" at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. ;Books *Full text of [http://www.archive.org/details/conradandeudorao00chivrich Conrad and Eudora; or, The death of Alonzo] ;About *Thomas Holley Chivers (1809-1858) at the New Georgia Encyclopedia *Thomas Holley Chivers at Find a Grave *Poe and Chivers from The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1909. *A Further Note about Poe and Thomas Holley Chivers at The World of Edgar Allan Poe weblog *"The Problematic "Chivers's Life of Poe" at The World of Edgar Allan Poe weblog: Part I, Part II, Part III ;Etc. *List of extant letters between Poe and Chivers at the Edgar Allan Poe Society Category:American poets Category:Writers from Georgia (U.S. state) Category:Edgar Allan Poe Category:1809 births Category:1858 deaths Category:Transylvania University alumni Category:19th-century poets Category:English-language poets Category:Poets